Menu 123 is a free online food ordering platform that connects hungry diners from New York, New Jersey & Philadelphia with more than 1000 local restaurants. Diners can now eat what they want, when they want, where they want. No more drawers full of outdated old menus! Now the most up-to-date menus for people favorite restaurants are in the palm of their hand. It's so easy and convenient. Customers simply browse to find the type of food they want to eat, place the items into their cart and then prepay for their oder - it's that simple. Regardless of your cuisine preference or time of day, Menu123 can help satisfy their cravings.

It was September, 2012, when our partnership with Menu123 started. Together with our client we’ve started building their business from scratch. And I don’t mean just flailing in the wind with product ideas, half-hearted brainstorms and trying to make a quick buck or two. I mean a real business. Built to last — strong for the long haul, serving a higher purpose.

Keeping story short, after few years of working together, we became not only their remote development team, we became part of their business, part of their team, infactforquite long time they remained the only one client that we work with.

Over the initial design and build period, we constantly built things up and refined the experience down to its core elements. With each iteration we’d find ourselves removing or adding — sometimes interface elements, other times features. This constant ‘go-wide’ exploration, followed by an intense period of selection and refinement allowed us to create a focused experience where the primary goal was to make a great food ordering experience for website users, and business tool for restaurants.

A good design is an informed design. We iterated and refactored our design ideas, over and over, and in 2015 it became obvious that during 2 years of the development a lot of things has changed: now we knew the real customer journey maps, who is using our service & the most important — how people use it. It was the right moment to refresh the visual appearance of Menu123 website.

With the new Menu123 look we’ve established a voice and appearance that appealed to their target audience and after multiple iterations, we arrived at the designs below.

In computer science, the term “adaptive system” refers to a process in which an interactive system adapts its behavior to individual users based on information acquired about its user.

In the context of Menu123 - website adapts to whatever device user is using (mobile, laptop, desktop, ipad) and his location. Weshowdiffrent features,diffrent page layouts and in some cases we change user flow in order to meet his expectations.

Menu123 is a huge multistore system that supports more than 1000 vendors with ability to run almost without people input. We’ve built a huge system with a lot of great features: sophisticated menu data entry tools, complex solutions to reflect restaurant’s work hours & delivery zones, order confirmation & notification processes, promotion & coupon engine, user accounts, refund processes, credit card gateways and finance system that covers accounting & vendor reimbursement processes.

 

I’m responsible for the overall user experience (UX) of this project, strategy behind and user interface design of the organization’s products and services. As a product owner I represent the stakeholders in this project. I’m accountable for ensuring that the team delivers value to the business. I write customer-centric items (typically user stories, acceptance criteria, BMPN schemes, wireframes, design mockups), rank and prioritize them,  add them to the product backlog.